I think he meant that fine tuning probably isn't necessary on the UI quite at this stage of development. Expose the info, sure, but do it and move on. Don't spend a month on getting the icon art just right.

Josh wrote:Started off RTB the right way: with a lot of hours and a lot of code In this first week, I'm going to be focusing heavily on wrapping up the basics. Yes, there are a number of exciting 'advanced' features to finish, but right now, what I want to see is a complete foundation -- the most basic elements of play polished and beta-ready. Wherever your journey through the stars may take you, it invariably begins in a rather humble place: one person in a ship. This is the 'beginning,' and it's here, rather fittingly, that I want to first focus my completion efforts. The HUD, the handling, the firing, and the most basic ship controls. The theme of RTB is, as explained in the meta-update, to evoke the sense of "ah, now this looks like a playable game." This week, our goal will be to evoke that feeling at the level of the information presented on the HUD, as well as basic, single-ship management.

The key word here is "polished". I think we can be pretty sure that whatever he releases, it's going to look good. That's just how he rolls.

Cargo management looks poor. It's just a list. I expect more attractive icons (to at least be able to identify objects at glance) and more visual feedback when moving cargo around. "Depiction of the object" offers a lot of potential in this regard (as well as for hardpoints, etc.) and is my favorite part of this update.

I don't know that the cargo management looks poor because we aren't looking at the only "mode" to it. If you look at the top right of Name box there seems to be a button for list mode and for another mode. One would presume that is an icon mode. So what you seek may actually be in the game, just Josh didn't show us that mode.

mcsven wrote: I think we can be pretty sure that whatever he releases, it's going to look good. That's just how he rolls.

Yes indeed, mcsven! I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would expect anything else from Josh. If you've been around these parts for any length of time you will know how the coding warrior operates.

He delivered Chapter 2 and it was shiny, polished and pretty damn awesome. Of course there are details to work on but what I'm seeing now in the UI is a professional artistic job. Just look back at earlier incarnations and start grinning like a Cheshire cat.

I think RTB Chapter 2 was a success. And I also think the interface is ready for beta now. Yes, A Beta is not necessarily for releasing a buggy game, and If the LT beta is bug free, cool, the beta time can be used by Josh for balancing the game and other crucial changes. So there is really no problem. There will be a problem though if Josh comes next week saying that the edges are more rounded and the icons more glowy. In this I agree with Abh.

The interface matters a lot. It's the part of the software that players must grapple with (through their control device of choice) for what may be many, many hours.

Knowing that I'm likely to be staring at the LT UI for a long time is why I spoke up about hoping for text that more completely fills each menu item. The payoff for a little time spent on that will be a game whose text is more readable by many players for many hours. So I think that feedback/suggestion is defensible.

At the same time, it sounds like there's more content yet to be developed beyond building out the interface for the existing features. So I'm hopeful that it won't be many weeks before a RTB update describes those final features.

In particular I'm still waiting to hear about multi-system gameplay, and what's going to be done to insure that that contributes as much fun to the game as purely in-system play.

Perhaps most of all, though, I'm looking forward to the RTB update in which Josh tells us that he's had a multiple-star-system version of the game up and running on one of his PCs all week, and it's still running without crashing, and it's still fun to play with at that point. I'd really like to get that report before Beta... and I also think that report will be the signal that the Beta is imminent.

My main point and it isn't so much a gripe as an observation, people keep making reference about the interface and how required it is and yadda yadda. There *has* been an interface... multiple iterations of one in some form or another. We all know that prototype did in fact have a mostly complete and functional UI. Now obviously we needed something better than that, but the point is that all this talk and stuff of the UI being "new" and only recently designed is either not true, or a bit silly. Given that it's already relatively late in the game. I love what he's done I really do, but I just worry that these are things that should have been locked down a long long time ago. I really hope that it doesn't take him "a week" to finish up/tidy up/lock down every single facet of the game on the road to beta... or we might be at RTB "Week 20" before we know it. However on the flip side given that none of us except Josh truly knows how "far" along he is maybe there will only be 5 weeks, 6 weeks who knows. I really hope we don't have a "week 20+" of RTB... that worries me greatly.

TGS wrote:My main point and it isn't so much a gripe as an observation, people keep making reference about the interface and how required it is and yadda yadda. There *has* been an interface... multiple iterations of one in some form or another. We all know that prototype did in fact have a mostly complete and functional UI. Now obviously we needed something better than that, but the point is that all this talk and stuff of the UI being "new" and only recently designed is either not true, or a bit silly.

The prototype was much simpler than the current LT. As you stated, we need something "better" than it, but it's more than that. There is just so much more "stuff" that needs a UI that anything from the prototype would probably be useless.

TGS wrote: Given that it's already relatively late in the game. I love what he's done I really do, but I just worry that these are things that should have been locked down a long long time ago. I really hope that it doesn't take him "a week" to finish up/tidy up/lock down every single facet of the game on the road to beta... or we might be at RTB "Week 20" before we know it. However on the flip side given that none of us except Josh truly knows how "far" along he is maybe there will only be 5 weeks, 6 weeks who knows. I really hope we don't have a "week 20+" of RTB... that worries me greatly.

I think I will be more disappointed if I see him go back and re-do the these interfaces again. Truthfully, if you actually go back through all the dev videos, how many times have you seen an interface that looked mostly complete, only the next time you see it in a future video it's been completely redone, then the next time you see it, it appears to have been redone again... For RTB to be successful, I honestly think Josh has to tell himself, "alright, it's done, I'm not going to tweak it at all anymore", then move on to the next thing.

Josh can of course do what even he pleases, just if he wants to actually get the game done at some point it's probably the mentality he needs to take on.